Table manners

About a week ago I went out to dinner with two men and a woman.

They are the sort of people who know what the correct seating arangement should be, who pull our your chair for you or insist on carrying your drink for you. There are certain ways that things are done. Cutlery was handled properly, there was a suggestion that we retire to the drawingroom where nightcaps were indulged in, tones were muted, conversation was very varied and stimulating.

It was all very Jane Austen. Not at all what I am used to. At home we don't eat with our fingers, but it's a very messy, tangled, raucous affair. I've always loved it.

But I found that I really liked the sense of ... oh, decorum I guess is the word. It really appealed to me. And I was good at it. I charmed those charming people right back.

And I found I was more articulate than usual, more sure of myself, with more poise than I thought possible. This interests me particularly because of a book I read recently.

It's called the Tipping Point, and it's worth a look, certainly. In it, Malcolm Gladwell lays out a very good case for how the little things in your environment affects you. The lighting in a fast-food joint. A piece of litter on a bus. Whether you're in a rush or not.

I'm sure we've all noticed this before: depending on who you're with or where you are or what you had for breakfast, you will react differently, behave diffently. Be someone different.

Here's a summary of one of the studies that Gladwell uses in his book:

John Darley and Daniel Batson, Princeton University psychologists, decided to conduct a study inspired by the story of the Good Samaritan.

They met with a group of seminarians and asked each one to prepare a short talk on a given theme. Then they would walk individually to a nearby building to present it. Along the way to the presentation each student would run into a man who was planted in an alley. He would be lying there, moaning & groaning in pain. The question was who would stop to help the man.

Darley and Batson asked half of the seminarians to give their talk on ministry opportunities available for students after graduation. The other half was asked to prepare a short devotional on the story of the Good Samaritan. Also, the researchers wanted to find out if being in a hurry made any difference to the students. So they told one third of the group that they had plenty of time to get to the building to give their talk so they could take their time. Another third was told that they would just make it in time if they left right now. And the last third was told that they were already late-they'd better get moving immediately!

So, which ones offered to help the man in pain? It turned out that it made no significant difference whether the student was giving a talk on job opportunities or the Good Samaritan. What did make a difference was how much of a hurry he was in. Of the "low hurry" subjects, 63% offered help; of the "intermediate hurry" subjects, 45% offered help; and of the "high hurry" students, only 10% offered help.

The experimenters concluded that the study would seem to indicate that bystander apathy is encouraged not only by the crowding in today's world but also by the rush of big-city life as contrasted with the more leisurely pace of smaller towns. In our "hurry-up world" it is easy to excuse why we don't help others.

So maybe I'd like to slow down a bit. Slow enough to figure out who we want to be, regardless of the situation.